Life & Wisdom Quote by William Butler Yeats

Dreams are not an escape but a summons. To imagine is to cross a threshold where duty begins. William Butler Yeats placed the line "In dreams begins responsibility" as the epigraph to his 1914 collection Responsibilities, marking a turn from the misty romance of his early Celtic Twilight period toward a harder-edged engagement with art, politics, and the costs of vision. The sentence reads like a hinge between two worlds: the inner one that gives birth to desires, ideals, and myths, and the outer one that demands we answer for what those visions set in motion.

For Yeats, dreams are multiple. They are the private longings that shape a life; the aesthetic ideals that drive a poet to refine language and form; the national imaginings that stirred Ireland in the early twentieth century. To dream any of these is to incur an obligation to make them real responsibly, to steward them rather than merely bask in them. The grammar matters: "begins" suggests genesis, the instant a dream takes shape is the instant answerability starts. Intention cannot be neatly separated from consequence.

The line also carries a warning. Dreams can intoxicate. Unchecked, they harden into dogma or spectacle. Yeats would later describe a "terrible beauty" born of revolutionary passion, recognizing how visions can both ennoble and devastate. Responsibility, then, is a call to discriminate between worthy and destructive imaginings, to accept that beauty requires discipline, that ideals require compromise, and that myth carries real-world effects.

As a credo for an artist, it demands fidelity to craft and to truth, not just to inspiration. As a social ethic, it insists that collective dreams be judged by their human costs. And as a personal maxim, it says that once you picture a different life, you owe that vision the work, restraint, and courage needed to bring it into the daylight without betraying its promise or the people it touches.